Kill or Capture (Brannigan's Blackhearts Book 7)

by Peter Nealen

  The shaved ape in a black polo folded his massive arms in front of his chest. He reminded Winter of one of Flint’s chosen psychopaths. Flint had always preferred the big, aggressive, and violent instead of the thoughtful and professional.

  “I’m going to need you to give us your weapons,” the big man said. “This is a restricted area, and we are currently in a security alert situation.”

  “You are trying to disarm us in a security alert situation?” Winter replied calmly. “That hardly seems like common sense.”

  “I don’t know you,” the big man snarled. “’Alpha Two-Seven’ is a cute little secret squirrel callsign, but it doesn’t mean shit to me. Your creds are supposedly legit, but until I know more about who you are and what you’re doing here, you’re not going to be running around here armed. In fact, until I get some answers, you’re not going to be running around anywhere.”

  Winter knew that this was it. It wasn’t going to take long for Bevan or his meathead of a security chief to figure out what a paramilitary team was doing there. There weren’t that many possibilities. And he couldn’t gin up a lie about a security threat that they’d been sent for, because Site 117 being an Indigo Lithium site, the site security should be aware of any such threats. Furthermore, a paramilitary team wasn’t sent to reinforce a static security team. They were sent for sabotage, assassinations, and terror attacks.

  He glanced across the row of security guards standing behind the big man. There were about ten in front of them, all with short-barrel AUGs or MP9s.

  He turned to Gamma, who was his second, now that Beta was dead, making a show of shrugging, as if surrendering. In the process, he got a look off to the flank, seeing the other three on their right.

  Thirteen to nine. They really should have been better prepared, but again, the team outside, whoever they were, had helped him.

  As he met Gamma’s eyes, he blinked twice. Gamma blinked once.

  And they turned like lightning, their ARX160s coming level, already on auto.

  It might have been poor judgement, but Winter shot the big man first, stitching three rounds across his upper torso as he leaned into the rifle, his left hand clamped around the forearm, dragging the muzzle to the left. His rounds punched into the next man’s throat with a spray of red, then the man’s face behind him, snapping his head back as his eye disappeared.

  By the time he got to the next target, they were all down, the gunfire falling silent.

  Two of his men had been shot, but neither mortally. Iota had a bullet hole in his leg, and was already cinching down a tourniquet around his upper thigh. Zeta had taken a 9mm through the shoulder, his arm hanging mostly uselessly.

  “Move,” Winter said, pointing toward the rear of the house. “The entrance is back there, and there will be resistance now.” He smiled slightly behind his beard. “I think we’ll find that it’s a good thing we brought the explosives that we did.”

  Chapter 16

  Flanagan felt exposed as hell up on the ridgeline. He wasn’t questioning why he was up there; he knew as well as Brannigan did that they needed eyes on the enemy. He was just on a barren hillside without much in the way of cover or concealment, with drones in the sky overhead. It was a risky game he was playing.

  But then, it wasn’t like Blackhearts missions were ever anything but risky as hell.

  He rushed toward the next rock, dropping to a low knee behind it and peering over his scope at the valley below. Of course, “rush” was a bit of a relative term; between the weight of his pack and the elevation, he wasn’t moving all that fast.

  It had taken some time, but the men on the ATVs had regrouped at the bottom of the valley. They’d been joined by two bigger vehicles, up-armored Yukons if he was identifying them correctly, with what looked like miniguns sticking out of sunroof turrets. The back hatch of one of the Yukons was open, and it looked like several of the men in gray were pulling something out.

  Gomez shuffled past him, heading for the next meager bit of cover. Flanagan stayed where he was, trying to judge the range.

  As he watched, two figures lugged a large plastic case out of the back of the Yukon, setting it on the ground and undoing the latches. Flanagan grimaced, wishing they’d brought sniper rifles. The vehicles were just over a thousand meters away; he might make a shot with the ACE 52, but losing four to six inches of barrel length made it a crap shoot. Accuracy was possible with 7.62mm with a shorter barrel; Flanagan himself had made accurate hits with a twelve-inch barrel out to twelve hundred meters. But the round had lost a lot of energy by then, and he wasn’t confident that he wouldn’t just be wasting ammo.

  They had only come in with so much. They needed to make every shot count.

  The men gathered around the case were pulling something out. He couldn’t see well enough with the three-power optic to get much detail, but he could see enough. They tipped a stubby cylinder up on a pair of legs, pointed up toward the ridgeline. At first glance, it might have looked like a mortar, but something about it wasn’t quite right for that. After a moment, Flanagan realized what he was looking at. They were unpacking and preparing a drone for launch. And from the size of it, he couldn’t be sure that it wasn’t a lethal one.

  His eyes narrowed as he watched. This was bad. From twelve hundred meters out, he couldn’t reliably take them under fire, and if they got that thing up, it was going to be damned near impossible to take it out before it fired on them. Or hit them itself, in an explosive, kamikaze dive.

  He was really wishing that Curtis or Bianco were up there right then. The MAG-58s had better range than the shorter-barreled ACE 52s.

  “Kodiak, Woodsrunner,” he called. “The bad guys are prepping a drone to launch. Looks like it might be carrying a warhead; if I can get a shot at it, I’ll take it, but suggest that we scatter.”

  “Roger,” Brannigan replied. “Get to some cover up there if you can, but try to keep eyes on.”

  Even as he said it, the drone shot out of the launch tube with a faint puff of expelled gasses, popping its four wings out in a cruciform pattern as it soared up into the sky. Flanagan grimaced as he watched it, tracking it upward with his scope, trying to judge time and distance. He recognized the profile. It was an Israeli Hero-30 drone, packing a one-pound warhead. They were getting ubiquitous on the open weapons market; the Israelis apparently didn’t care who they sold to, as long as they weren’t directly calling for Israel’s destruction.

  It was a long shot, and he wasn’t entirely sure that he had the lead right, but he tracked well ahead of the climbing drone and squeezed off a shot.

  He kept firing. The target was small and moving fast, and so he couldn’t trust to just one shot. He pumped five rounds into the drone’s path before one apparently hit.

  At that distance, the 7.62x51 wasn’t packing nearly as much punch as it had at what was normally considered combat ranges, but against a relatively fragile target like a drone, it didn’t have to. He just had to damage something vital, even just a control surface.

  He wasn’t sure what, exactly he’d hit, or if he’d even hit it; Gomez had opened up on the drone just after he had. But the white cruciform UAV suddenly fluttered like a stricken bird and went into a flat spin. It wobbled, almost looking like it might recover, as the controller back at the vehicles tried to compensate for the damage, but the drone’s capability was just barely too limited. It spiraled down out of the sky and smacked into the hillside about four hundred yards below Flanagan and Gomez.

  That was when one of the miniguns opened up from the nearest Yukon.

  Flanagan flattened himself into the dirt and rocks as a hellstorm of high-velocity metal chewed into the hillside just below him, the impacts spewing grit and stinging fragments over him. The stream of bullets snarled and ripped into the hillside like a buzz saw, and he scrambled backward, keeping as low as possible, the rough ground abrading the side of his face as he skull-dragged back to better cover.

  Only once he got behind a bigger rock did h
e dare look for Gomez. The other man was almost invisible, but he was still moving, scuttling backward faster than Flanagan could have imagined was possible. But Gomez was downright scary in the field; he’d been giving Flanagan and Childress both a run for their money as the team’s top sneaky fieldcraft guys from the day he’d joined up.

  The snarling buzz saw of high-velocity metal growled by again, kicking more dirt and shattered bits of rock over them, but they’d been right at the crest before, and now were just below it. The only defense against a minigun for men on foot was to get a terrain feature between them and the gunner, and if they slipped another few yards downhill, they’d manage just that.

  The only problem with that was that they’d lose eyes on, giving the enemy free reign to maneuver on them unobserved.

  “Keep moving north,” he rasped, pointing. “We need to step it out; if they don’t know where we’re going to pop up again, they’ll have a harder time targeting us.”

  They were going to have to start playing a deadly game of hide-and-seek; there was no other way to maintain contact without exposing themselves too much. Move up, pop over the ridge to get a look, then drop down and move again.

  It was an old sniper’s game, one that had been mostly forgotten in a military that was usually overburdened and nearly paralyzed by the requirements of armor and gear. But Flanagan and Gomez had been students of fieldcraft for a long time, and not only in the context of hunting deer.

  They scrambled along the ridgeline, fighting to move quickly while keeping their footing. A side hill makes for difficult movement; either one foot is always higher than the other, or else they have to be kept in line, treading a glorified tightrope along the hillside. And when there’s no path, there’s the constant risk of twisting an ankle, and the constant tendency to slip downhill.

  The minigun fire had stopped, and Flanagan was peering up at the sky, listening and watching for another drone, trying to judge how far they’d come, and if they dared take another look over the crest yet. As he did so, he thought he heard something over the rasp of his labored breathing and the pounding of his pulse in his ears, which seemed almost as loud as the crunch of gravel and dirt under his boots.

  “Mario!” he hissed, but it wasn’t necessary. Gomez had halted, frozen, just a couple paces ahead of him, his head cocked toward the crest to their right. He heard it, too.

  Flanagan turned and started up, keeping low, using one hand to help himself scramble up the steep and none-too-stable slope as his boots scrabbled for purchase, his rifle held in the other. The rocky grit always seemed to want to slide out from under his feet on the slope, and he had to catch himself on rocks or the low, scrubby bushes.

  The sound of ATVs was getting louder. They must have figured that the miniguns had either suppressed them or killed them, and now the shooters were coming to check.

  Bad call.

  Flanagan threw himself flat as he spotted the faintest hint of movement up ahead. It was almost as if a shadow had passed along the edge of the ridgeline, announcing the enemy’s appearance a second before he crested it. He found himself in an almost perfect prone position, looking up at the crest behind his rifle, as the ATV, with two men in storm gray astride it, was suddenly skylined above him, barely ten yards away.

  It was like shooting fish in a barrel.

  His first shot thundered as the driver’s head filled his scope, the blast kicking grit and dust away from him in a stinging cloud. The rifle kicked straight back into his shoulder, the barrel rising just enough that he lost the sight picture, but he’d been pretty sure of the shot. Gomez had fired at almost the same instant, their two shots blending together into one rolling report.

  They’d also both shot the driver, who had vanished as Flanagan got back down on target. The rider behind him was trying to dive off as he was smashed off his feet by a second pair of shots.

  Despite the deadened ringing in his ears from the gunshots, Flanagan could still hear a second ATV. They weren’t out of the woods yet. He got off his scope to scan the crest frantically, looking for the next targets.

  The other ATV hadn’t shown itself yet. The pair riding it must have seen their comrades go down, and were being more cautious.

  Flanagan backed away from his position, getting his feet under him and dashing back the way they’d come and slightly downhill. He was going to pay for it getting back up, and he knew it. His legs were already protesting the exertion of the last couple of days, but there was nothing for it.

  It sometimes amazed him, just how far the human body could be pushed when its survival was on the line.

  He’d made it about fifteen yards, Gomez staying put and covering him, when he saw the first of the Front shooters.

  The guy was trying to crawl over the crest of the ridge, though his plate carrier was causing him some trouble. Plate carriers are designed for close-quarters fighting, standing up, and having all the magazines and gear on the front not only holds a man’s body up off the ground when he’s in the prone, but they catch on the ground and slow him down.

  It was why Flanagan had brought an old-school load bearing vest for his chest rig; he could pop the front clips and get even lower, if need be.

  But right then, he didn’t take the time. He snapped his rifle up, taking the split second to steady the reticle on the man’s center mass, which was just above the edge of his front plate, just as the crawling man looked straight at him.

  He didn’t know for sure if the man had really seen him or not, even though he froze where he was for a second before Flanagan shot him. Flanagan’s rifle thundered, spitting flame in the thin air, and the man jerked, blood spattering from the hole punched through his clavicle. Crimson splashed from his lower back as the bullet tore its way through his heart and lungs and erupted out through the top of his buttock.

  He lolled and slumped where he was, dead, and Flanagan was already moving, gasping for air as he forced his legs to propel him, bent forward, toward another rock just downslope, watching for the dead man’s buddy.

  But the other man didn’t appear. And in moments, he heard the ATV beating a hasty retreat, the buzz of the engine dwindling as he raced down the hillside.

  The radio crackled in Flanagan’s ear. “Kodiak, Pancho Villa,” Gomez said, his voice as flat and emotionless as ever. “We need to break contact and get off the X. We’re not going to be able to maintain eyes on.”

  “Roger,” Brannigan replied. “Get your asses north, ricky-tick.”

  Flanagan looked up at where Gomez lay, his tan khakis almost invisible against the mountainside. He wondered, briefly, if the man he’d just killed had even really seen him at all before he’d died.

  Fighting to keep his breathing deep and even, he started struggling back up the slope to join Gomez. Provided the enemy didn’t have more drones ready to drop explosives on their heads, they should be able to get some serious distance before any of the Front shooters managed to get back over that ridgeline again.

  ***

  Brannigan didn’t call a halt at the riverbed that slashed its way down the valley between the two ridgelines. They had some terrain between themselves and the enemy down in the V between the two arms of the ridge they’d abandoned, and while he was starting to hear more drones overhead, so far, they hadn’t been dive-bombed. And time was clearly of the essence.

  Wade and Kirk had pushed up to take point, and while Wade was clearly hurting from the altitude, he was stubborn enough that he was refusing to slow down. Kirk looked like he was on a walk in the park. Brannigan didn’t know what the man did in his spare time, but he clearly spent a fair amount of it training.

  The fast pace, however necessary, was getting them strung out quickly; when Brannigan looked back, he couldn’t see Jenkins anymore.

  “Vinnie! Kevin!” he hissed. The two machinegunners, both sweating and breathing hard despite the chill in the air, lumbered up to him. Curtis in particular looked like he was about ready to lie down and die. Vegas was over ten thousa
nd feet lower than their current elevation, and Curtis was a weightlifter, not a mountain climber.

  “I need you guys to set up here, covering down the riverbed,” he whispered, even as he glanced up at the sky, hearing the faint buzz of a drone. His muzzle tracked up toward it slightly, though he wasn’t nearly as sure about getting a hit on a diving kamikaze drone as he imagined Flanagan must have been. He knew he was a good shot, but Flanagan was better. “Just in case they come up on us while we’re crossing. I’m going back to make sure we didn’t lose Jenkins.”

  Curtis muttered something as Santelli lumbered past. The retired Sergeant Major was digging deep, his head down, his breathing rough, just planting one stumpy leg in front of the other. He barely slowed down as the two machinegunners got set in, and Brannigan headed back through the waist-high brush that had gotten thicker at the bottom of the ridge, as they’d gotten closer to the riverbed.

  He spotted Jenkins soon enough, flanked by Burgess and Hancock. Burgess was trying to look game, despite the bruises still on his face and the slight limp he had been carrying since his kidnapping. Hancock just looked pissed, as if he was angry enough to ignore the thin air or the rough terrain.

  Jenkins was in a world of hurt. He was stumbling and sucking wind. His rifle hung on its sling, barely grasped by nerveless fingers.

  “He came back to make sure I wasn’t falling out, Colonel,” Burgess said quietly.

  Brannigan gave him a hard look. He knew that Burgess was trying to be a team player, to cover for Jenkins. But right then, the team couldn’t afford to cover for the weak link.

  “Sit down, Jenkins,” Brannigan said. “Catch your breath.” Hancock didn’t say anything, but just held up, his rifle in his hands, looking back the way they’d come and up at the sky, his rage written all over his angular features.

  Jenkins slumped down where he stood, quickly turning the movement into the “rucksack flop.” He leaned his head back over his ruck frame, gasping for air.

  Brannigan exchanged a glance with Hancock, then turned to Burgess. “Go on ahead, Tom. Rally up with Carlo on the other side of the riverbed. Kevin and Vinnie are covering the long axis.”